Apt Imaginings: Feelings for Fictions and Other Creatures of the Mind [Hardcover]

Apt Imaginingsaddresses the question of how our emotions and desires for the contents of fictions, fantasies, and other products of the imagination relate to the feelings we have about things in the real world. A contribution to the theory of the emotions, the philosophy of fiction, and the psychology of art, this book argues that the normative criteria that determine the fit, morality, or rationality of our feelings for what we believe are distinct from those criteria that apply to what we imagine.How do our engagements with fictions and other products of the imagination compare to our experiences of the real world? Are the feelings we have about a novel's characters modelled on our thoughts about actual people? If it is wrong to feel pleasure over certain situations in real life, can it nonetheless be right to take pleasure in analogous scenarios represented in a fantasy or film? Should the desires we have for what goes on in a make-believe story cohere with what we want to happen in the actual world? Such queries have animated philosophical and psychological theorizing about art and life from Plato'sRepublicand Aristotle'sPoeticsto contemporary debates over freedom of expression, ethics and aesthetics, the cognitive value of thought experiments, and the effects on audiences of exposure to violent entertainment.InApt Imaginings, Jonathan Gilmore develops a new framework to pursue these questions, marshalling a wide range of research in aesthetics, the science of the emotions, moral philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and film and literary theory. Gilmore argues that, while there is a substantial empirical continuity in our feelings across art and life, the norms that govern the appropriateness of those responses across the divide are discontinuous. In this view, the evaluative criteria that determine the fit, correctness, or rationality of our emotions and desires for what is internal to a fiction can be contrary to l€